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The World of Iberian converso practitioners,

from Lluís Alcanyís to Isaac Cardoso

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 The World of Iberian converso practitioners,

From Lluís Alcanyís to Isaac Cardoso (*)

Jon Arrizabalaga (**)

(*) This article is an outcome of the research project BHA2002-00512, which is funded
by the Dirección General de Investigación of the Spanish Ministry of Education and
Science. I am grateful for their comments and suggestions to Teresa Huguet Termes,
Víctor Álvarez Antuña, Andrew Cunningham, and several participants at the
international conference “Beyond the Black Legend: Spain and the Scientific
Revolution / Mas allá de la Leyenda Negra: España y la Revolución Científica”
(Valencia, UIMP, 21-24 september 2005) where it was presented as a paper. It has been
published at Víctor Navarro; William Eamon (eds.), Más allá de la Leyenda Negra:
España y la Revolución Científica / Beyond the Black Legend: Spain and the Scientific
Revolution, Valencia, Universitat de València — CSIC, pp. 307-322.

(**) Dept. of History of Science

CSIC-IMF
Egipcíaques, 15
E-08001 Barcelona (Spain)
+34 934 426 576 (phone)
+34 934 430 071 (fax)
<jonarri@bicat.csic.es>
Introduction

The lives of the two figures whose names have been highlighted in the title of this work
mark a period of almost two hundred and fifty years —between the mid-fifteenth and
the late seventeenth century. It was a time when the fortunes of the Jewish minority in
the Iberian kingdoms went through many great difficulties which would to a great
extent determine the further history of this minority. Among the most remarkable of
them are (1) the setting up of a new Inquisition in Spain (1478) and Portugal (1536;
from 1547 with complete freedom of action), whose main original purpose was the
prosecution of crypto-Judaism or Marranism; (2) the gradual implementation —in the
kingdoms under the Spanish Monarchy from the mid-fifteenth century onwards, and in
Portugal from the period of the Iberian union (1581-1640)— of the statutes of “purity of
blood”, that legalised the social exclusion of new Christians in blocking or making their
access to any public position or high honour difficult; (3) the expulsion from the Iberian
kingdoms of all those Jews who were not prepared to comply with the decrees of forced
conversion to Christianity that had been issued by the kings of both crowns —the
Catholic Monarchs in 1492, and King Manoel I in 1497; (4) and the two Sephardic
Diasporas, namely the one immediately resulting from the late fifteenth century
expulsion decrees, towards the eastern Mediterranean and northern African regions, and
the other, throughout the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, towards different
destinations in western Europe —Italy (Venice, Verona, Livorno), the Low Countries
(Antwerp, Amsterdam), southern France (Bordeaux, Bayonne), London, Hamburg—, as
well as the West Indies (the Caribbean area, Brazil) and the East Indies (Goa).

The terminus ad quem of this paper in the late seventeenth century is chosen because
the huge internal changes had by then shaken western Sephardic communities —for
example, Baruch Spinoza published his Tractatus-theologicus-politicus in 1670. Seen
retrospectively, these changes represented a turning point towards the modernisation of
western Sephardic communities, as they definitely broke their perception of Judaism as
a way of life covering every single aspect of human life, and made illusory their former
experience of Jewish identity as a single corporative entity —a “republic” or “nation”—
participating in a tradition that was lived organically in the face of an anti-Semitism
whose reference framework was still medieval (Yerushalmi 1989: 253-254; Kaplan
1996: 19). This time-frame is also justified because during the last years of the

2
seventeenth-century, the Iberian medical practitioners’ intellectual world —like that of
their Christian colleagues— was more and more open to the new trends from
experimental philosophy as well as to the many effects this had in medical practice.

Lluís Alcanyís (Xàtiva, Valencia, c.1440-Valencia, 1506), within less than five years
went from being one of the most distinguished practitioners in the city of Valencia —he
was royal physician to Ferdinand the Catholic and first professor of medicine at the
recently established Valencia university— to being publicly burned at the stake, along
with his wife, after both had been condemned for secretly practising Judaism
(Arrizabalaga 1983; Arrizabalaga 2008). As for Fernando/Isaac Cardoso (Trancoso,
Portugal, 1603/1604-Verona, 1683), after some twenty years (from 1627-1630 to 1648)
of successful professional practice in Madrid —the town and court of the Hispanic
monarchy— where his fame had enabled him to acquire the protection of the powerful
Conde-Duque of Olivares (c. 1635-1637), he moved to northern Italy and settled in the
ghetto of Verona, where he clearly recovered his Jewish identity and devoted himself
for the rest of his life to practising medicine as well as to studying natural philosophy
and the holy books of Judaism (Yerushalmi 1989).

Alcanyís’s and Cardoso’s life vicissitudes might appear to be rather extreme to illustrate
those experienced by most Iberian Jewish practitioners from mid fifteenth to late
seventeenth century. Yet they are not exceptional. Many other physicians of this lineage
could be mentioned who plainly recovered their Jewish identity at some time of their
lives, and/or lost them as a result of Inquisitorial sentences. Furthermore, both of them
shared with other sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Iberian medical practitioners some
sociological and intellectual features, which I will attempt to portray in this paper. For
this purpose, I have chosen to use the biographies of Francisco López de Villalobos
(c.1473-c.1549), García de Orta (c.1501/2-1568), Andrés Laguna (c.1511-1559),
Amatus Lusitanus (João Rodrigues de Castelo Branco) (1511-1568), Cristovão da
Costa/Cristóbal Acosta (c.1525-post 1592), Alonso López de Corella (1518/9-1584),
Rodrigo de Castro (1546-1627), Francisco Sánchez (1551-1623), Henrique Jorge
Henriques (c.1555-1622), Abraham Zacutus Lusitanus (1575-1642), Isaac Cardoso
(1603/4-1683), and Isaac Orobio de Castro (c.1617-1687).

3
Certainly, the number of Iberian converso practitioners is infinitely greater than that of
those whose lives have been reconstructed to a greater or lesser extent from their written
works, particularly in the case of those having belonged to the Jewish social elites who
were able to have them printed, and/or from the documental traces left at the archives
especially by those who were prosecuted by the Inquisition. As Yosef Kaplan (1996:
107) has rightly pointed out, the historiography of early modern Iberian Jews and
Sephardic Diaspora has been more focused on cultural and religious aspects than on the
social history of this minority. But this has been due to diverse reasons, mostly common
to other fields of historical research, from historians’ greater concern for the activities
social elites as testified by their preserved written works, to the variable availability of
other kinds of sources among which those inquisitorial ones have been paid particular
attention and have given a peculiar bias to research on this topic.

This article is intended to explore, from a limited sample of cases, the sociological
profile and the intellectual world of sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Iberian Jewish
practitioners. Yet, before going into its core, some historiographical considerations on
this topic are provided, and the major features which shaped the early-modern Iberian
legal-politic context with respect to the converso physicians, are pointed out.

The historiography of Iberian converso practitioners: Some preliminary considerations

The historiography of Jewish medicine and of Jewish practitioners in early-modern

Iberian kingdoms and Sephardic Diaspora is uneven. Approaches that are typical of
traditional medical history have coexisted with a movement of historiographical renewal
that —like in other similar research fields— has attempted to integrate history of
medicine into the social and cultural history of early modern Europe. 1

1
Among the classical studies, the medical-history ones by Harry Friedenwald (1944), and Maximiano
Lemos’s biographies of Amatus Lusitanus (1907), Zacutus Lusitanus (1909), and Antonio Nunes Ribeiro
Sanches (1911) as well as the early-modern history ones by Julio Caro Baroja (1978), and Antonio
Domínguez Ortiz (1978), should be referred to. On the other hand, the biographical studies by Yosef
Hayin Yerushalmi (1989) and of Yosef Kaplan (1989) are illustrative of the above-mentioned
historiographical renewal. On Jewish medical practice, with particular emphasis on inter-cultural issues,
see the collective volume edited by Samuel S. Kottek and Luis García-Ballester (1996).

4
Irrespective of having shared with “disciplinary” histories a legitimising role for modern
medicine, historical studies on Jewish medicine have tended, like other “national”
historiographical traditions, to extol the Jewish medical tradition by emphasising the
Jews’ contribution to the development of modern medicine. The purpose of vindicating
a historically marginalised social minority has often increased this emphasis, to the
point of postulating a sort of “natural” idiosyncrasy of Jews for the cultivation of
medicine as being responsible for the singular excellence that has allegedly
characterised Jewish practitioners’ professional exercise over the course of history. 2

The persistence of this assumption reflects ideological a-priorisms held by some

scholars on the question of Jewish identity. Benzion Netanyahu’s thesis about early
modern Iberian Jews is well illustrative in this respect. To him, the setting-up of the
Inquisition did not pertain to religious, but to political, social and racial reasons. His
essentialist conceptions of ‘identity’ have brought him to deny the existence of Iberian
crypto-Judaism or Marranism, by considering it an invention that was created and
maintained by the enemies of the “new Christians” in order to fight them, and to claim
that almost all Spanish Jewish conversos were faithful Christians (Netanyahu 1966,
1995).

Other historians, by contrast, have insisted on the need for keeping the issue of the
meaning of Marranism free from preconceptions and, still more, from legal definitions
(Yerushalmi 1989: 34). Until the twentieth-century emergence of the modern concept of
racism and of the idea of the Indo-European and Semitic races, Judaism was just
considered a mere religion, never an ethnic group and, still less a race (Pérez 2005: 20).
The mutual fluid exchange of identities between the “new Christians” and the “new
Jews” that can be detected among the early modern Sephardis, illustrates the open,
dynamic, and complex condition of the identity-shaping processes as well as the
essential role that cultural diversity and crossbreeding play in them. In a similar way to
what happened among the Catholic and Protestant intellectuals, the growing influence,

2
David B. Ruderman (1995: 1-13) has underlined and discussed the widespread notion of Jews’
“conspicuous involvement in and propensity for scientific achievement”. On the other hand, Winfried
Schleiner (1995) often slipped down this slope when, in a rather acritical and anachronical way, he
praised sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Jewish practitioners in the Diaspora as champions of “natural
religion” and of lay and humanitarian medicine, in contrast to the sectarianism of their contemporary
Catholic and protestant colleagues (pp. 68, 72-73, 86).

5
in the course of the early modern period, of religious syncretism, deism, and
agnosticism among the Sephardic communities, reinforces the truth of this claim, not
least because this alternative approach is much more fruitful in historiographical terms
(Yerushalmi 1989: 37; Kaplan 1996).

On the other hand, the persistence in the field of Hispanic studies of Américo Castro’s
assumptions about the quantitative and qualitative significance of Jewish medical
practitioners in the history of Spain, cannot be forgotten. His original thesis that
medicine was “one of the occupations that was more practised by cultivated Jews and
more neglected by the Christian Spaniards” in medieval Spain (Castro 1983) has been
extrapolated to the early modern period, so that medical figures with an innovative or
dissident profile have been too often ascribed to Jewish lineages, without conclusive
proof. The case of the physician and natural philosopher Juan Huarte de San Juan
(c.1529-c.1588) is very significant at this respect. Because in his Examen de Ingenios
para las Ciencias (Baeza, 1575) —published repeatedly in several European languages
between the late sixteenth and the early eighteenth century— he ascribed to the Jews a
peculiar talent for practical medicine by virtue of the natural complexion of the People
of Israel, Huarte has been often considered to be Jewish, with no further evidence, and
without noticing that he described himself as a theoretical, and not as a practical,
physician (Gracia Guillén 1984: 342-343, 344; Ruderman 1995: 285-294).

Among these preliminary historiographical considerations I would like to also make one
on the relationships between Jewish medicine and the “Scientific Revolution”. The
investigations on early-modern Jewish physicians and scientists cannot continue to be
led by questions such as to what extent and why they did, or did not, participate in the
Scientific Revolution, or whether the Jewish religion was in this respect an advantage or
a disadvantage for them. The profound revision that the dominant historical paradigm of
the Scientific Revolution has undergone during the last decades (Lindberg & Westman
1990; Cohen 1994; Osler 2000) forces us to abandon the traditional Positivist narratives
of early modern science based on themes such as the production of new big ideas by
great scientists representing major breakthroughs towards modern science, and a
dialectics between producing centres and recipient peripheries of modern science, the
gradual separation of science from religion, and so on.

6
Thus, Iberian Jewish practitioners’ activities should be also relocated by understanding
them in their specific socio-cultural context, and by reconstructing as comprehensively
as possible the intellectual “world” of these practitioners, by means of strategies taken
from the new social and cultural history. The fruitfulness of these new strategies is
evident enough not only from the greater prominence and complexity that such figures
are given through these new “lenses”, but also from their greater capacity to recover the
Iberian medical and scientific past.

The Iberian legal-political context and the converso medical practitioners

The determination of the Catholic Monarchs (1469-1516) for the political unity of the
Iberian kingdoms emphasized their concerns about religious unity. The secular coexistence
between the Christian majority, and the Muslim and Jewish minorities, had experienced a
gradual deterioration during the late Middle Ages, the ending of which happened very
quickly during Isabel’s and Fernando’s reign. The convivencia between Christians and
Jews had begun to break down at the end of the thirteenth century, but it rapidly
deteriorated from the mid fourteenth century until its final collapse in 1492, when the
Catholic Monarchs promulgated an edict that was responsible for the expulsion from the
Castile and Aragon Crowns of the about 90,000 Jews who were not prepared to convert to
Christianity. Moreover, from the end of the fourteenth century —the beginning date of a
more or less voluntary process of conversion of Jews to Christianity that lasted the whole
fifteenth century— until well into the eighteenth century, this conflict would extend to the
“new Christians” and their descendants.

In 1478, the Catholic Monarchs were given by pope Sixtus IV the bull that provided them
with a new and effective tool to suppress those conversos who had remained secretly
faithful to their old religion, namely the crypto-Jews or judaizantes. The new Inquisition
Court was composed of ecclesiastical judges, although they were closely dependent on the
State: the monarchs appointed the judges of the Holy Office, and the civil arm executed
their sentences. From the early sixteenth century onwards the Inquisition, which was not
definitely abolished until 1834, extended its competence to prosecute other religious
minorities (Lutherans, Erasmians, Calvinists, alumbrados and Moriscos) or punishable

7
social behaviour (sodomy, bigamy, witchcraft, priests’ sexual abuse, and so on). Yet Jews
never stopped being targeted by the Inquisition.

In Portugal, the edict of the forced conversion of the Jews was promulgated in 1497,
although the Inquisition was not set up until 1536. The different dates and implementation
timing of the forced conversion decrees and of inquisitorial repression in Spain and
Portugal help to explain the greater cohesion that Portuguese Jewish communities showed
throughout the following centuries, in contrast to a greater breaking-up of the Spanish ones
(Yerushalmi 23-24). The changing political relationships between the two Iberian
crowns in the course of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries are also essential to
explain the migratory flows of Jews between the territories of both crowns as a response
to either (or both) the need to avoid inquisitorial repression, and to the hope for socio-
economical improvement. For instance, the severity of the Portuguese Inquisition after
Philip II’s annexation of Portugal to the Spanish Crown (1580-1640) meant that many
descendants of those Spanish Jews expelled by the Catholic Monarchs who had taken
refuge there and had been forced to convert into Christianity in 1497, escaped back to
Spain, where the converso question was then raising much less inquisitorial virulence.
Moreover, under Philip IV’s reign, Portuguese new Christians who had migrated to
Spain were offered attractive socio-economical inducements, despite the fact that after
1640, when Portugal revolted and gained independence from the Spanish domain, the
living conditions of these émigrés were rapidly worsening (Kagan 1974: 90-92; Kamen
1992: 288-301).

While the Inquisition acted as the main instrument for repression of the Jewish minority by
the Christian majority, the “purity of blood” statutes efficiently served the purpose of
social exclusion of the new Christians and their descendants. From the mid fifteenth
century onwards, the cult of the “purity of blood” had led to a profusion of estatutos that
legally regulated this requirement to acquire a series of honours, posts and dignities, the
number of which continued to grow in the course of the following two hundred and fifty
years. Yet it was only during Philip II’s reign when these statutes received definitive royal
legitimization and were spread across the separate territories under the Hispanic
Monarchy, as a result of the new statutes of the chapter of Toledo cathedral that had been
instituted by archbishop and Primate Cardinal Juan Martínez Silíceo in 1547. During the
seventeenth century, the huge list of Hispanic corporations demanding “cleanness” of their

8
members included military orders, law courts, cathedrals and chapters, several religious
orders, university colleges, some provinces and cities, public and municipal posts,
brotherhoods and guilds (Yerushalmi, 28). In introducing the lineage (new versus old
Christian) as a basic parameter for social discrimination, this special legislation ended
up radically transforming the ideological principles of social organization: in order to
succeed to an endless number of posts and honours, the purity of faith —the theological
reason— was no longer enough, a demonstration that any individual’s blood was
“clean” from Jewish lineage was demanded —a stigma which was considered to be
hereditary and indelible, even if its genealogical burden was minimum. The centring of
the debate on the purity of blood in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Castile made the
dichotomy clean/stained blood an essential question and a battlefield where social
exclusion was resolved in absolute terms (Sicroff 1979; Méchoulan 1979; Gracia
Guillén 1984; Carrasco Martínez 2000: 30).

The sociological profile of early modern Iberian Jewish physicians

From the late Middle Ages onwards, the gradual development of the State bureaucracy
meant the reinforcement of previously instituted procedures to control health practices, as
well as the setting-up of other new ones. Among the former, the privilege to confer titles
allowing medical practice, which was given to the universities from the fourteenth century,
needs to be emphasised. The generalisation of this privilege from the late fifteenth century
meant that the traditional pattern of medical training in the late medieval Iberian Christian
kingdoms —based on the craft apprenticeship and the so-called “open model” (García
Ballester 1988: 42-45)— experienced a gradual closing, in favour of the universities,
which ended up monopolising the control of titles for medical practice.

Among the new procedures to control health practices the relevance of the Real Tribunal
del Protomedicato is to be stressed. This remarkable institution which was established by
the Catholic Monarchs continued in operation until 1799 and was only abolished in 1822.
In contrast to the Crown of Aragon and Navarre, where the authority of this court was
reduced by the prerogatives of guilds or “colleges” of physicians, surgeons and
apothecaries, and by the “examiners” who were designated by municipal authorities, in the

9
Crown of Castile the protomedicato had exclusive legal authority to exercise a wide
number of specific powers. Among them there were the regulation and control of
physicians, surgeons and apothecaries, the punishment of offences in their health practices,
and the resolution of professional conflicts.

The law (pragmática) issued by the Catholic Monarchs in 1477, and traditionally
considered as the founding law of the Castilian Protomedicato (Iborra 1987: 23-24),
represents the earliest royal attempt to regulate health occupations in a comprehensive
way. This pragmática whose contents were ratified in the subsequent ones of 1491, 1494,
and 1498, gave to the protomédicos and alcaldes examinadores mayores in possession of
royal authorisation, the authority, to examine a wide spectrum of health practitioners
working in all the territories of the Crown of Castile. This spectrum reflected the
heterogeneous profile of health occupations and professions typical of the “open model”
(mentioned above) namely physicians, surgeons, apothecaries, herbalists, ensalmadores
and other similar practitioners; individuals of both sexes, belonging to any of the three
religions, and with full- or part-time dedication to these arts, with no apparent
discrimination on the basis of their social status. The licence granting permission for health
practices appears to be subject only to the condition that the candidates were found to be
suitable for the assigned practices. Although the figure of the alcaldes examinadores
mayores with judicial competence had been present in the Castilian and Aragonese
legislations from the thirteenth century onwards (Campos Díez 1999: 25-29), the 1477
pragmática is the earliest Hispanic law where the intervention of these alcaldes as a multi-
personal collegiate institution was contemplated. This feature conferred on the
Protomedicato a superior legal status (Campos Díez 1999: 44-45).

The authority of the Protomedicato was reinforced in the course of the sixteenth and
seventeenth centuries. Yet the pragmáticas issued by subsequent Hispanic kings offered
some substantial changes compared to those issued by the Catholic Monarchs. First, the
Ordenanzas issued by the Courts of Valladolid in 1523 reduced the number of health
occupations under the Protomedicato’s legal authority to physicians, surgeons, and
apothecaries, despite the fact that the barbers whose licenses had previously depended on
the municipal alcaldes examinadores were now within its jurisdiction. This restrictive
tendency —which was reiterated by the courts of Madrid in 1552 and 1567— was
consolidated by Philip II’s two pragmáticas: that of 1588, which limited the

10
Protomedicato’s jurisdiction to physicians, surgeons, and apothecaries; and that of 1593,
which excluded from it the romancistas surgeons —who, in turn, were again placed under
its jurisdiction by Philip III’s pragmática of 1604 (Campos Díez 1999: 48-49).

Secondly, the Protomedicato’s jurisdiction was restricted in the course of time also in
territorial terms. While the 1477 pragmática was in operation in the whole Crown of
Castile, the 1523 Courts of Valladolid reduced its jurisdiction to the royal court and within
a five league radius —a limit that was subject to the itinerant nature of the Castilian royal
court until 1561, when it settled in Madrid. As Soledad Campos has emphasised, this
“measure was taken as a result of reiterated petitions by the people’s representatives at the
Courts that they did not want to lose for their cities the prerogatives they had over the
control of health occupations and on the visitations to the pharmacies, although the
competence to examine and grant licences to the practitioners was exclusive to the
Protomedicato” (Campos Díez 1999: 53-54).

Finally, by virtue of another pragmática issued by the Catholic Monarchs in September

1501 and repeatedly ratified in the subsequent centuries, those aspiring to occupy a public
or royal post in the court, a city or a town in all the kingdoms and domains under the
Hispanic Crown as physicians, surgeons or apothecaries, had to prove before the
Protomedicato that neither they nor their parents or grand-parents had ever been
condemned by the Inquisition for heresy or apostasy (Muñoz Garrido 1969: 72). As the
“purity of blood” statutes were extended from the mid sixteenth century onwards, all the
descendants of Jews and Moriscos were potentially subject to the restrictions that these
rules established for the practice of health occupations.

On the other hand, converso practitioners, like the Morisco ones, were also potentially
subject to legal challenge by the Inquisition, as long as they were members of religious
minorities, the repression of whose beliefs had been the founding driving force of this
court. Jewish, like Morisco, practitioners were the target of numerous inquisitorial
processes, although there were substantial differences between them concerning the
reasons why the former and the latter had to appear in court before the Holy Office. As
pointed by García-Ballester, while the Morisco healers were often charged with
necromancy in their health practices, the reasons why converso practitioners were
prosecuted were mostly different from this (García Ballester 1993: 158, 163-164). Yet,

11
there were also exceptions to this rule, such as in the case of Francisco López de
Villalobos, who in 1508, after being accused of having obtained his designation as a
royal physician thanks to his alleged role as “magician, wizard, and charmer”, was tried
and imprisoned for eighty days by the Cordova inquisitor (Arrizabalaga 2002).

I have already pointed out the potential restrictions that the “purity of blood” statutes
introduced through the Protomedicato for those practitioners who belonged to families of
“new Christians”, on acceding to health posts linked to royal or municipal institutions. But
this was not the only way converso practitioners were socially excluded. The obsession for
the cult of the “purity of blood” also made it difficult for the new Christians to enter
universities for medical training and/or professional career.

From the mid sixteenth century onwards, in the context of the general spreading of “purity
of blood” laws, those established at the colleges of the major Hispanic universities,
particularly the Castilian ones of Valladolid, Salamanca, and Alcalá, were notorious for
their rigidity (Kagan 1974: 90-92). Those who did not manage to get around this obstacle,
had to choose between becoming second-class students at these universities, or trying to
enter another Hispanic university with less strict statutes —e.g. the so-called “minor
universities”— or emigrating to a foreign university —in France, Italy or the Low
Countries, above all— where intolerance towards the Jewish minority was less or where
their identity could be more easily hidden. The higher the university degree was (bachelor,
licentiate, doctor/master) to which they aspired, the greater the difficulties they had to cope
with. This helps to explain that the title of doctor/master was not common, not even among
those who showed deep intellectual interests throughout their professional careers.

On the other hand, some converso practitioners obtained the doctorate late in their careers,
more often in foreign universities, and, presumably, when their prestige, influence and
financial resources had allowed then to overcome the obstacles caused by their Jewish
lineage. The cases of Andrés Laguna and Henrique Jorge Henriques plainly illustrate this
issue. After having studied arts for two years at Salamanca university, in 1530 or early
1531 Laguna moved to Paris where he got the arts degree and studied medicine. In 1534
he obtained the bachelor degree in medicine at The Sorbonne, but he did not take his
doctorate until eleven years later (1545). Not by chance, he obtained this new title at
Bologna university which was then directly subject to the authority of the Roman

12
papacy, in the court of which Laguna had managed to acquire a growing influence. This
influence also allowed him to buy during the 1540s some titles by means of which he
was doubtless trying to wipe off the stigma of his Jewish lineage. By contrast, from
1568 onwards Henríques studied arts in the university of Coimbra and, then, medicine
in those of Coimbra and Salamanca. However, he only obtained his medical doctorate
between 1595 and 1603, that is, after becoming forty, and presumably by taking
advantage of the more favourable political climate towards the Portuguese conversos
that the new king Philip III (1598-1621) had inaugurated (Arrizabalaga 1996: 72).

The most usual places where converso practitioners began their professional careers were
the municipalities within the vast domains under the Hispanic Monarchy. While they could
even occupy permanent medical positions in small towns, in the cities they had to be more
often satisfied with free practice as a consequence of the more effective enforcement of the
“purity of blood” statutes, and because the atmosphere of greater professional competence
used to lead to more professional rivalries and to a greater risk of being denounced by
colleagues who desired their posts.

When the converso practitioners opted for an academic career, their attempts used to
happen early in their professional lives, and to end soon with their giving up. In a
similar way as the academic beginnings of their old Christian colleagues, their aims
were pinned on positions linked more often to “minor” faculties —those of arts— than
to the “major” ones —such as that of medicine; they used to occupy the vacancies in a
provisional way as “applicants” (pretendientes) or aspirants to permanent (de
propiedad) chairs, and more frequently those chairs considered as secondary. The move
sometimes from one position to another suggests a professional progression up to the
point where a change of direction happened almost invariably in the professional career
of these physicians. Henríques, for example, successively occupied a lectureship in the
Salamanca arts faculty and two more at the Coimbra medical faculty —the lectureship
of Avicenna as a “substitute”, and that of practical medicine as the “first elected” for
it— before passing into the Duke of Alba’s exclusive service (Arrizabalaga 1996: 70).
On the other hand, Cardoso, after having studied medicine in Salamanca and receiving
the degree of bachelor in arts and medicine at the university of Valladolid about 1623,
obtained a temporary chair of philosophy and was “applicant” to the “first of medicine”
(Prima de medicina) chair, before moving to the royal court under the patronage of the

13
Almirante of Castile, and then of the Conde-Duque of Olivares (Yerushalmi 1989: 48-
58). Finally, it seems that Garcia de Orta, who had studied arts and medicine in Alcalá
and Salamanca, won a provisional lectureship of natural philosophy at Lisbon university
about 1530, after three frustrated attempts to as many posts at the Lisbon arts faculty.
Yet, not even his appointment as a royal doctor to João III about the same time
prevented him from moving to India in 1534 —probably also impelled by growing
inquisitorial pressure— where he settled in Goa as personal doctor to the most
outstanding dignitaries, both Portuguese and local (GEPB: xix, 674-676).

Therefore, the most convenient alternative for converso practitioners’ social promotion
was to turn to the patronage of the nobility (either civil or ecclesiastical) for protection.
The exchange of gifts between the patron (a nobleman) and the servant (a doctor) in the
socio-cultural context of the Old Regime, was neither conducted in exclusively
monetary terms nor limited to the terms own to the clinical relationship. The physician,
in addition to giving his professional services, used to play other roles such as those of
friend, advisor, messenger, and even accomplice to his patron’s sexual affairs. In
exchange, the nobleman used to sponsor the extra-professional (scientific, literary,
artistic, and so on) activities of his protegé, to give him social status by facilitating his
access to other nobles and/or to the royal family, and to act as a protective umbrella
before final misfortunes —something converso medical practitioners highly appreciated
for easily imaginable reasons.

The specificity of court ideology in regard to this is obvious from a passage of the
Diálogo que pasó entre un Grande deste reino de Castilla, estando con el frío de la
cuartana, y el doctor de Villalobos, que estaba allí con él (“Dialogue between a Spanish
grandee of the kingdom of Castile who suffered from a quartan cold, and Dr. Villalobos
who was there with him”). The context of this dialogue, which was annexed to a letter
Francisco López de Villalobos wrote to Alonso de Fonseca, archbishop of Santiago de
Compostela between 1510 and 1516, was the complaint of this grandee (probably the
Duke of Alba himself) about the lack of relief of the symptoms of the quartan fever he
was suffering from. Villalobos’ apparently successful intervention in this case led the
grandee to propose that the doctor remain in his exclusive service by doubling his salary
and offering a less hectic professional life than the one Villalobos had as a royal
physician. The doctor replied to him in the following way, “I, lord, do not live with the

14
king because of what he gives me, but because of what he can give me without taking
money out of his pocket. And if I continue living with him, your lordship can save the
salary you would have to give me, and still make use of me, as we already know that
you will never get away from the king unless you die” (Paz y Meliá 1964: 208;
Arrizabalaga 2002: 58).

Another striking feature in the sociology of early modern Iberian converso practitioners
is their travelling profile during their formative times and professional lives, by
comparison with their contemporary old Christian equivalents. Actually, from the
sixteenth century onwards, medical students’ high mobility, so typical in late medieval
universities, decreased much quicker among the old Christians than among those from
converso lineages. And the same might be said about the differences of mobility
patterns between the medical practitioners of both groups. Again, the explanatory key to
their different behaviour is to be found in the fact that the members of the marginalised
converso minority needed to search for developing new strategies to avoid the
conditions of social exclusion that the old Christian majority had imposed upon them.
Certainly, these travels could be a positive response (giving advantages from the
medical training supplied by the universities of other cities or countries, and offering
socio-economic improvement by benefiting from favourable situations like the political
union of Spain and Portugal, or the overseas colonial expansion of both Iberian powers).
Equally these travels could be a negative response (to the difficulties of obtaining a
university title or a licence of practice from the Protomedicato, fleeing from
inquisitorial pressure, and so on). On the other hand, the Sephardic Diaspora provided
the Iberian converso practitioners with a dense and efficient network to take in the
émigrés, on the basis of their family connexions and community support beyond
religious convictions (Kaplan 1996).

To the already mentioned case of Garcia de Orta others could be added here, such as
those of the practitioners Rodrigo de Castro (1550-1627), whose professional career
developed in Hamburg from 1594 to his death (Friedenwald 1944: 449-452), and
Abraham Zacutus Lusitanus (1575-1642), who lived in Amsterdam from 1625 to his
death (Lemos 1909; Friedenwald 1944: 307-321). The case of the Portuguese Jewish
Amatus Lusitanus (1511-1568) is paradigmatic here. After having studied medicine at
Salamanca where he took his degree about 1530, Amatus’ career developed in Lisbon

15
until 1533, when the growing hostility towards the Marranos led him to abandon
Portugal and live successively in Antwerp (1533), Ferrara (1540), Ancona (two
different stays begun in 1547 and 1552), Rome (1550), Pesaro (1555), Ragusa (1556),
and Salonica (1558), where ten years later he died a victim of plague. All these cities
had significant Jewish communities, even though these communities were not always
protective enough of Amatus in the face of the Holy Office’s prosecution (Lemos 1907;
Friedenwald 1944: 332-345).

This is a convenient point to emphasise that only in Ragusa and Salonica, both of them
under Ottoman domination, could Amatus Lusitanus enjoy a continuously peaceful life.
On the other hand, Garcia de Orta in Goa led a dual religious life during thirty years,
which was only discovered by the Inquisition in 1580, years after his death, while
Rodrigo de Castro and Abraham Zacuto returned to Judaism and fully lived their
ancestors’ religion during the last decades of their lives in Hamburg and Amsterdam,
respectively.

The intellectual world of the Iberian converso practitioners

The reconstruction of the intellectual world of the Iberian converso practitioners relies
on their preserved written works, both printed and manuscript. These mostly deal with
medical topics, although the number of those dedicated to natural or moral philosophy
issues is significant and, in the case of those, like Cardoso and Orobio de Castro, who
converted to Judaism, there is Jewish apologetic literature.

A great deal of these medical works belongs to literary genres that were also largely
cultivated by their contemporary old Christian colleagues. There are often texts of
practical medicine, like the collections of clinical accounts (observationes) by Amatus
Lusitanus (Basel, 1556) and Abraham Zacutus Lusitanus (Amsterdam, 1634 and 1642);
there is the encyclopaedic compilation by Rodrigo de Castro on women’s diseases
(Hamburg, 1603); the plague treatises by Lluís Alcanyís (Valencia, c.1490), Andrés
Laguna (Strasburg, 1542), and Rodrigo de Castro (Hamburg, 1596), all of them written
on the occasion of epidemic crises in the cities —Valencia, Metz and Hamburg,

16
respectively— where their authors were developing their professional careers; books of
medical remedies in the context of’ the classical tradition of Dioscorides (Amatus
Lusitanus, 1536 and 1553; Andrés Laguna, 1554 and 1555) as well as collecting new
simples from the East Indies (García de Orta [Antwerp, 1567], Cristovão da Costa
[Burgos, 1578]); and the health regimes by Andrés Laguna (Cologne, 1546) and
Henrique Jorge Henríques (Salamanca 1594).

In Laguna’s case, editions and commentaries of medical texts from Greek-Latin

Antiquity, with particular attention to Galen and Dioscorides, occupy a significant place
in his written production, reflecting his connection with Greek Humanism or Hellenism
from his Paris formative years under masters like Jacques Dubois (Jacobus Sylvius),
Guenther von Andernach and Jean de la Ruelle. The Hellenist programme for medical
reform advocated the recovery —entirely cleansed of any extra-Hellenic additions— of
the original Greek medicine, and it openly rejected the Arab and late medieval Latin
cultural heritage which Jewish medicine felt fully indebted to. This programme, whose
purist and reactionary content was undeniable, exerted a great influence on sixteenth-
and seventeenth-century European medicine. Certainly, from the last third of the
sixteenth century onwards there was a growing tendency in European university
medicine towards a positive revision of the Arab and late medieval Latin heritage —
regarding the Hispanic case, López Piñero has called it “Counter-Reformation medical
scholasticism” (López Piñero 1979: 351-353). Yet the striking appreciation of Arab
medical authorities showed by almost all Iberian converso practitioners under
examination in this paper leads me to wonder to what extent it also meant a tacit
vindication of their particular cultural identity. Henríques, for instance, alter having
underlined the need for the perfect physician to be a great Latinist and to possess a
medium knowledge of the Greek language, also recommended medical students learn
Arabic in order to “perfectly understand the Arab authorities like Avicenna and
Averroes who, even though they have been translated and we have Arabic dictionaries
to learn many words that have remained without explanation because of the translators,
in their original [Arabic versions] would teach us the truth more clearly, because the
scarce [Arabic] knowledge of Avicenna’s interpreters has led many people to err”. 3

3
“… entender perfectamente los authores arábigos, como son Avicena, y Averrois, los quales aunque
anden traduzidos, y tengamos diccionarios arábicos para saber muchos vocablos que por causa de los
traduzidores quedaron sin exposición, con todo sabidos originalmente nos enseñarían más claramente la

17
Conversely, Laguna’s marked alignment with medical Hellenism could correspond not
only to the development of his training and early career in some of the places and
periods of greatest stridency of this movement, but also to a presumable rejection of his
own Jewish identity (Caro Baroja 1978: II, 188-189, note 55). His already-mentioned
determination to wipe away the traces of his converso lineage seems to point at the
same direction.

Along with this positive re-evaluation of the Arab and late medieval Latin heritage, the
intellectual profile of early modern Iberian converso practitioners was characterised by
a marked eclecticism that was respectful of ancient, medieval, and renaissance medical
authorities; however it remained within the limits of the Hippocratic-Galenist medical
tradition, with an explicit rejection of medical sects and neoteric movements. Henríques
and De Castro plainly illustrate this rather traditional intellectual profile.4 The former
insisted that along with the doctrines of Hippocrates and Galen, whom he considered to
be the two major medical authorities, practitioners should also know those of Avicenna,
Paul of Aegina, Rhazes, Aetius of Amida, Alexander of Tralles, Celsus, Haly Abbas
and Johannes Actuarius, among other many Latin, Arab and Byzantine authorities
mentioned, both ancient and medieval; and that they should “work hard to imitate these
serious men in all the good and fruitful things they wrote for their faculty, because
imitation makes errors diminishe, art to grow, difficult things to turn into easy, and the
mind to lighten”. 5

The same could be said of Rodrigo de Castro, who was very critical not only of those
physicians belonging to sects (the Empiricists, Methodists, and Rationalists),
supposedly because with their endless confrontations trying to destroy each other they
put their patients’ lives under serious risk; but also of those who, in searching for their
own glory, scorned the authorities (Galen, Celsus, Avicenna) and only leant on their

verdad, porque del poco conoscimiento, que han tenido los intérpretes de Avicena, han dado ocasión a
muchos para errar” (Henríques 1595: 187-188).
4
The case of the young Diego Mateo Zapata (1666-1745), who in the late seventeenth century fought the
chemical doctors before “converting” into one of them, is an illustrative late instance of this traditional
intellectual profile among Iberian converso practitioners. See Pardo Tomás 2004.
5
“trabajar mucho por imitar estos graves varones en todo lo bueno y provechoso que escrivieron para su
facultad, porque con la imitación menguan los errores, el arte crece, lo difficultoso se buelve fácil, y el
entendimiento se alivia” (Henríques 1595: 103).

18
own experience. De Castro called for the presence in the medical practitioners’ libraries
of authorities, such as the Arabs (Avicenna, Averroes, Rhazes, Avenzoar, Mesue and
Serapion), the Latin medievals (Pietro d’Abano, Petrus Hispanus, Gentile da Foligno,
Guy de Chauliac, Matteo del Garbo, Hugo da Siena, Niccolò Falcucci, Jacoppo da Forlí,
Jacques Despars, Antonio Guaineri and Bartolomeo Montagnana, among others), and
the renaissance writers (Guenther von Andernach, Jean de Gorris, François Valleriola,
Jean Fernel, Georgius Bertinus, Cristóbal de Vega, and Luis Mercado); and rejected the
“chemists’ sect” that he called the “fourth medical heresy” (De Castro 1662: 84-91, 14-
19). As a part of his self-affirmation of his identity as a “new Jew” —after years of
medical practice in Lisbon, in 1594 he had moved to Hamburg and converted to
Judaism— De Castro approved the medical use of the allegedly magical powers of
Kabala, in contrast to his total rejection of the pagan forms of magical healing that he
condemned as superstitious (De Castro 1662: 223-238, particularly 224; Ruderman
1995: 297-299). Besides, he condemned Paracelsus, whose opposition to the idea that
Jews possessed a talent for medicine superior to the gentiles’ one, and his demand for
an exclusively Christian ministry of this art, he could by no means ignore (De Castro
1662: 14; Rudeman 1995: 245-246).

Yet apart from the positive valuation of the cabalistic tradition, the above-mentioned
features indicate a rather traditional medical profile, though hardly exclusive to Iberian
converso practitioners, since these features correspond to the neo-Scholastic thought
that was dominant in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Spanish and Portuguese
universities, where both groups of practitioners —converso and old Christian— had
been trained (Kaplan 1989: 314). A nonconformist driving force could be, however, a
more significant feature differentiating the new Christians from the old ones. In the
medical field, this driving force appears to be well reflected in a literary genre that was
frequently deployed by converso practitioners, namely works on medical ethics and
etiquette. These were writings referring to the physicians’ obligations, their intellectual
and moral basis, the conditions for their professional training and practice, and the
framework of their relationships with other health practitioners. In this field, two printed
works stand out from the rest, namely the Retrato del perfecto médico (1595) by
Henrique Jorge Henríques, and the Medicus-Politicus, sive De officiis medico-politicis
tractatus (1614) by Rodrigo de Castro.

19
Henríques’ Retrato reflects a professional ideal rooted in the dominant values of
Counter-Reformation Spain, even though its author’s dissatisfaction with so many
aspects of medical training and practice in late sixteenth-century Castile, and his
political and moral proposals to improve the art, actually made his portrait of the perfect
physician, to a great extent, its reverse. Henríques’ attention was focused on such issues
as the weak arts training, the low educational standards in the medical faculties, the lack
of travel experience and of professional control, and the exclusion of competent
practitioners and the promotion of the inefficient ones (Arrizabalaga 1996: 89-91). In
this last topic he explicitly denounced the serious discrimination that resulted from the
application of purity of blood statutes to the selection of those practitioners who would
occupy the public positions (“cargos y officios públicos”).

On the other hand, the Medicus-Politicus represents the vindication of a political role
for the medical profession by a new Jewish practitioner, Rodrigo de Castro, who, from a
prominent social position in the Hanseatic city of Hamburg, reaffirmed himself without
hesitation as a member of the Jewish community. De Castro painted the portraits of the
good and the bad physicians, firmly established a connection between medicine,
religion, and moral virtue, and presented king Solomon as the archetype of the fusion
between medicine and politics (De Castro 1662: 51; Ruderman 1995: 295-299). The
line along which the original stigma of the Jewish practitioner was here being
transformed into a sign of honour, would progress further in the hands of his son
Benedict de Castro who, in the Jewish apology Flagellum calumniantium (1631) which
he wrote as a reply to a libel against Portuguese Jewish practitioners, established that
the physician’s “holy task” was a specifically Jewish venture (Ruderman 1995: 299-
305).

I cannot end without referring, even briefly, to the books of ‘problems’ of natural and
moral philosophy. This popular literary genre in late medieval and early modern Europe
enjoyed a wide diffusion through the sixteenth- and seventeenth-century printing press,
and was very assiduously adopted by Iberian converso practitioners —Francisco López
de Villalobos and Alonso López de Corella were among the authors of collections of
‘problems’ which were repeatedly printed— although they were by no means the only
ones who did so. This is, doubtless, something which confirms the attraction for the
books of problems among their patrons and, more generally, among the civil and

20
ecclesiastical nobility whose courts were the main scene of their activities. Yet, Iberian
converso practitioners’ presumable taste for this genre, the roots of which go back to
pseudo-Aristotelian Problemata, might be also culturally indebted to the rabbinical
responsa —rabbis’ collections of decisions, presented in a structure of questions and
responses about specific cases, reflecting new natural and moral problems that had not
been considered in the Jewish holy books and that set legal precedents for future
occasions. Anyhow, this is a question demanding further exploration, so I will leave it
open for now.

21
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